The recent action, or refusal to act, by Kimberly Jean Bailey Davis, the county clerk of a Rowan County, Kentucky has created a bit of steam and irk among people who think that homosexuals should have the privilege of marrying each other. Many of the people who have condemned her action have taken part in civil disobedience in some form themselves, and many consider most examples of Conscientious Objection admirable. Although we usually think of Conscientious Objection in ...
Updated 09-06-2015 at 03:16 PM by PeterL
I am not an agent provocateur; I am an observer and commenter. It has been some time since the U.S.A. has had major political upheaval, so, like an earthquake zone that has not had any quakes, pressure has built up. If we look at the basic causes for the pressures, we can usually see unequal treatment before the law. Unequal treatment covers a lot of ground from discriminatory taxation to granting benefits to some people that are not available to all. Some more specific issues ...
Updated 11-14-2014 at 10:23 AM by PeterL
We know that it is our responsibility to engage in Civil Disobedience to force government to perform as it should, but there are NGO's, government authorities and government corporations that are used to carry out the functions that the government wants to put at arm's length. How should we deal with those? The answer is simple; they deserve the same treatment as any business corporation, and most of them should be spun off as private business. Like businesses, government owned enterprises have ...
Like Thoreau I firmly believe in the maxim: The Government that governs least governs best.” And like him I am not completely opposed to getting rid of government entirely; although that would entail more problems now than it would have in 1849, when Thoreau wrote “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”, but that essay puts forth some arguments that are not commonly given. I may have missed a few paragraphs, but I reread “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”, and I was impressed. Thoreau ...
I am not advocating the use of any illegal substance, but I do not believe that there should be any illegal substances, certainly not in a supposedly free society. There are fairly good rationales for the existences of some laws that are supposedly intended to save people from themselves, but I question whether it is the business of government to save people from themselves. I realize that there are individuals who are incapable of caring for them, and some laws are intended to protect such people ...